


Lay Your Hand In Mine

by orphan_account



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon - Comics, Canon - Movie, Families of Choice, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-06-09 21:04:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6923299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>If there's one thing you needed to know about Stacker Pentecost, then it's that he never went back on his promises. </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lay Your Hand In Mine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> You wanted something about Mako growing up under Stacker Pentecost's care and bonding over what the kaiju have taken from them, about Stacker's life before he became a Jaeger pilot and how kaiju took more than his health away from him. I gave that a good shake and this is what fell out. I'm sorry that it's sad as hell? /o\ Oh, and, I went with the comics backstory instead of inventing a new one, but I hope that it'll stand on its own regardless if you haven't read those.
> 
> Beta-read by miss_whoops. Thank you!! ♥ All remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> Title is from "Heart In Wire" by Matthew Mayfield.

It's raining on the day they bury Luna. Storming, dark skies, the whole affair. By the time they reach the hole in the ground that's supposed to swallow his sister, they're soaked through the bone. Tamsin says that's appropriate; heaven's weeping with them. Stacker thinks that's bullshit. 

Decades earlier, they buried his father in the same graveyard, and Stacker wasn't quite old enough to understand the concept of death. He doesn't remember the weather that day, but he thinks it was cold. He looked on as people shoveled dirt onto the coffin. Luna was crying. His mother held his hand so tightly it made him cry as well, and then she dragged him onto her lap and held onto him and told him it would all be okay. Luna reached for his hand from the seat across, squeezed it and smiled. 

That's the memory that goes through his head as they lower her coffin into the ground. An empty coffin, of course – there was nothing left of her, or even her jet. Nothing to be transported back home and laid to rest. This whole thing is symbolic. Maybe that's why it doesn't feel real, feels like theater, and why he expects Luna to walk up through the trees, nudge his shoulder and hug Tamsin so tight she'd squeak. But she doesn't. Because Luna is _gone_. A giant monster rose from the sea and took his sister. The thought almost makes him laugh, still, it's so surreal. All he can do now is look after Tamsin, because that's what he promised Luna, one drunken Saturday night a few years ago. He doesn't have any doubts that she made Tamsin promise the same thing when it comes to him. 

They both deliver speeches. He doesn't move a muscle through his, delivers it with as much stoicism as his speeches as Marshal years later. Tamsin cries all through her eulogy, but it's quiet, tears running down her face like an afterthought. She doesn't try and wipe them away. That, too, is fitting: much like Luna, Tamsin wouldn't be ashamed of her emotions. Neither of them would be ashamed of anything. Neither of them would do things halfway or pull their punches, even if the ones they'd hurt the most were themselves. 

They go home together, Tamsin and him, arm in arm, and in some way they never really let go of each other again. 

 

*** 

 

Tamsin doesn't have a burial, as such. She put that in her will – no one standing around in a graveyard, dressed in black and crying. She wanted to be burned and spread across a Hawaiian beach, far away from home. That way, she'd said, part of her could travel around the world forever. 

Down to earth and pragmatic as she was on the job, she could be a bit of a hippie. It wasn't her fault. Her grandmother had spent her early twenties in San Francisco and it must have clung to their genes somehow. Maybe that's what made her climb into a giant robot with him in the first place, back when everyone else was looking at the project down their nose, only approved because no one had a better idea. 

He scatters his co-pilot's ashes like she wanted, and it doesn't matter that he doesn't believe in this ritual. He'll pretend, for Tamsin's sake. Mako stands beside him, and he lowers himself to squat in the sand, tells her to take the urn and walk into the waves, right up until she can barely still stand, never mind getting her dress wet. He turns her in the right direction so the light breeze will carry the ashes across the sea, and they do it together, Mako's tiny hand covered by his much bigger one as they upend the urn and release its contents into the wind. 

When they're done, Mako looks up at him, eyes large and wet, and he picks her up and carries her down the beach, right back to their hotel room. Their bags are already packed. Tamsin is gone, but the war isn't over and she'd wanted him to stand his ground and keep fighting. He's going to make sure they win – for Tamsin, for Luna, for the little girl who'll still have to live on this earth long after he too is gone.

And he picks her up, Mako, and holds her close as she presses her face to his neck and cries, and he promises her in broken Japanese that he'll make the world a save place for her, even if it's the last thing he does. 

 

***

 

A few weeks after Pitfall, there's a state ceremony for the pilots who were lost at the bottom of the sea during their last stand against the Kaiju. The press is there, politicians and royalty and everyone else who thinks themselves important. Mako would have preferred a smaller ceremony, but she doesn't argue – her sensei deserves to be celebrated, to have as many people as possible acknowledge the sacrifice he made. The sacrifice they all made, Chuck and Sasha and Aleksis and Tang and Hu and Jin and so many more before them. 

She leaves the speeches to Hercules and other PPDC officials. She sits quietly in the back of the church, recalling how he came back for her and took her on an airplane. He gave her a new home, larger than life even without the Jaeger, the only person left on this earth who could make her feel less afraid. That's what she wants to remember; the day he found her, not the day she lost him. 

Raleigh holds her hand until it's time to stand and accept the condolences of passersby she has never met before and will never see again. She doesn't cry until they're alone, stood in the middle of a hotel room that's too large and too small at the same time; the windows are wide open, and yet she can't breathe, feels like she's suffocating, like the walls are closing in on her. Memories of another burial swim through her head, another hotel room more than a decade ago, in Hawaii. Before that, burying her parents. So much death, so many lives lost, and in this very moment it's a small consolation that no one else will lose their loved ones to the Kaiju ever again. 

Because that's what he vowed to her that day. And if there's one thing you needed to know about Stacker Pentecost, it's that he never went back on his promises.


End file.
